Nor was she spared any portion of its torments. Successively and in concert, vanity wounded to the quick, sickening self-pity, and implacable, grinding regret laid hold on her heart and soul and worried them till she had to bury her face in the pillow and sink her teeth into it to keep from screaming.
It was cruel enough to have loved and lost, but to have lost and still to love seemed punishment intolerable. The shameful knowledge that body and spirit still hungered for the man who had served both so shabbily ate into her amour-propre like a corrosive acid.
To her agonized imagination she figured in the semblance of a leaf harassed by that high wind of fatality which latterly had swept into and through her life with Bel, driving them asunder; a leaf torn from the homely branch that had given it life and nurtured it, a leaf hunted helplessly into strange ways and corners, even now being hounded on and on.... And to what end?...
She burned with resentment of her persecution by those unknown powers whose ill-will she had not wittingly done anything to invite, she writhed in the exasperation bred of her impotence to placate them or withstand their oppression.
A lull fell at last in the transports of her passion, she lay quite still, and her mind too grew calm in awareness of the quiet, resolute mustering of all her forces to wrest from malicious chance and circumstance the right to live a life of her own choosing; as if her soul, drawing strength from new-found knowledge of its indestructible integrity, lifted up its head and with calm eyes challenged Fate.
Her paroxysms were now spent and ended, the past had been put definitely behind her, it was with the future alone that she had need to be concerned.
She addressed herself to the task of taking stock of Lucinda Druce, the woman all alone, her condition and resources, and of trying to map out for her a new and independent existence that would prove somehow livable.
If she had not succeeded in this undertaking when the train breathed its last weary puffs under the echoing glass canopy of the La Salle Street station, success was not forfeited, it was but deferred. There was so much to be taken into consideration, she could not yet see further than tomorrow, if so far. Certain immediate steps were indicated to her intelligence as requisite and reasonable; whither they would lead she could by no means guess.
Bred on the Atlantic seaboard, she knew more of Europe than of the United States west of the Alleghenies. Chicago to her was a city that once had burned to the ground because a cow kicked over a lighted lamp; a city famous for great winds, something known as "the Loop," something hardly less problematic called "stock-yards." The name of a hotel, too, the Blackstone, had found lodgment in her memory.
The short drive in a yellow taxicab from the station to the hotel through a labyrinth of back streets a-brawl with traffic, failed to register any impressions other than of cobblestones, blasphemous truck drivers, street-cars pounding and clanging, begrimed buildings, endless columns of self-absorbed footfarers. The hotel itself seemed in grateful contrast, it might have been one of her own New York. Only the view from her rooms, many stories above the street, of a public park bleached, frost-bitten, desolate, and slashed by a black railroad cutting, and beyond this a vast expanse of tumbled waters, slate-grey flecked with white, blending with a grim grey sky, drove home the fact that her first uncertain gropings toward a new life were to be framed in a foreign, and to her perceptions an unfriendly, environment.